Close-up of a black script quote reading Tale as old as Time above a colour rose with a green stem and small bud on the back of a hand.

Script quote and rose on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A hand held in a loose curve shows black cursive script reading Tale as old as Time across the back of the fingers. Below it, a red and pink rose with a green stem and bud is shaded in soft colour, with a small pink heart-shaped petal and scattered dots nearby. The lettering uses clean black linework, while the flower is coloured with gentle shading against the skin.

Lettering Botanical Hand Script Quote Rose Bud Stem Heart Dot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the Marrowby Travelling Show pitched its tent in a wet field outside Hexham in the spring the elephant was sold. Ansel Cray, the ringmaster, had nothing left but a painted wagon, a strongman with bad knees, and a rose bush in a tin bath that his daughter watered each morning as though the crowds were still coming.

Keep reading

One evening a woman in a grey coat came up the lane with no bag and no horse. She stood over the bath and asked whether the show still had a tale to tell. Ansel laughed, then stopped, because the saying painted on his wagon door was true enough: a tale is as old as Time, and it lives only while someone tells it. So he told her how the rose had come from a garden behind a locked gate, where a beast had kept his sorrow among the bushes until a girl walked in asking for nothing.

The woman said the price of a tale was usually a true word. Nell, listening from the wagon step, said the true word had already been spoken. The woman bent to the bud, and a single pink petal, folded like a small heart, came away in her fingers. She tucked it inside her glove and walked back down the lane without looking round.

In the morning the bath held three open roses and the bud beside them, and the petal was gone. Ansel took a brush and a pot of gold paint to the wagon door, and beneath the old words he painted the year, and then, in smaller letters, the name of the one who had come to listen.